Complete Project Gutenberg John Galsworthy Works eBook

Why not? And yet—! Just as in this
spring night Felix felt so much, so very much, lying
out there behind the still and moony dark, such marvellous
holding of breath and waiting sentiency, so behind
this innocent petition, he could not help the feeling
of a lurking fatefulness. That was absurd.
And he said: “If you wish it, by all means.
You’ll like your Uncle Tod; as to the others,
I can’t say, but your aunt is an experience,
and experiences are what you want, it seems.”

Fervently, without speech, Nedda squeezed his arm.

CHAPTER IV

Stanley Freeland’s country house, Becket, was
almost a show place. It stood in its park and
pastures two miles from the little town of Transham
and the Morton Plough Works; close to the ancestral
home of the Moretons, his mother’s family—­that
home burned down by Roundheads in the Civil War.
The site—­certain vagaries in the ground—­Mrs.
Stanley had caused to be walled round, and consecrated
so to speak with a stone medallion on which were engraved
the aged Moreton arms—­arrows and crescent
moons in proper juxtaposition. Peacocks, too—­that
bird ‘parlant,’ from the old Moreton crest—­were
encouraged to dwell there and utter their cries, as
of passionate souls lost in too comfortable surroundings.

By one of those freaks of which Nature is so prodigal,
Stanley—­owner of this native Moreton soil—­least
of all four Freeland brothers, had the Moreton cast
of mind and body. That was why he made so much
more money than the other three put together, and
had been able, with the aid of Clara’s undoubted
genius for rank and station, to restore a strain of
Moreton blood to its rightful position among the county
families of Worcestershire. Bluff and without
sentiment, he himself set little store by that, smiling
up his sleeve—­for he was both kindly and
prudent—­at his wife who had been a Tomson.
It was not in Stanley to appreciate the peculiar
flavor of the Moretons, that something which in spite
of their naivete and narrowness, had really been rather
fine. To him, such Moretons as were left were
‘dry enough sticks, clean out of it.’
They were of a breed that was already gone, the simplest
of all country gentlemen, dating back to the Conquest,
without one solitary conspicuous ancestor, save the
one who had been physician to a king and perished
without issue—­marrying from generation to
generation exactly their own equals; living simple,
pious, parochial lives; never in trade, never making
money, having a tradition and a practice of gentility
more punctilious than the so-called aristocracy; constitutionally
paternal and maternal to their dependents, constitutionally
so convinced that those dependents and all indeed
who were not ‘gentry,’ were of different
clay, that they were entirely simple and entirely
without arrogance, carrying with them even now a sort
of Early atmosphere of archery and home-made cordials,
lavender and love of clergy, together with frequent
use of the word ‘nice,’ a peculiar regularity
of feature, and a complexion that was rather parchmenty.
High Church people and Tories, naturally, to a man
and woman, by sheer inbred absence of ideas, and sheer
inbred conviction that nothing else was nice; but
withal very considerate of others, really plucky in
bearing their own ills; not greedy, and not wasteful.